The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The Green Sea of Cicadas arrived in 2016 as part of Siordia Parfums' founding catalog, a fragrance that takes its inspiration from the sound of summer itself. In Mediterranean and Russian summers alike, cicadas fill the air with a sustained, vibrating hum that becomes the backdrop to everything: meals on terraces, late evening walks, the heat pooling in the afternoon. That thick green abundance, humming with life, is what Ekaterina Siordia set out to translate into scent. Not the beaches or the blue water, the green that surrounds them, the vegetation that holds the heat and returns it, alive. The name itself carries that layered meaning: green sea as both landscape and sound, inseparable from the season it describes.
What makes this composition unusual is the choice of tomato leaf absolute as a structural material rather than a supporting note. In most fragrances, green reads as a top accord, bright, fleeting, gone within the first minutes. Here, the tomato leaf holds its position through the heart phase, supported by wormwood absolute, which adds a bitter, medicinal depth that most green fragrances avoid entirely. The wormwood doesn't fight the freshness, it complicates it. Makes it less innocent. That's the Siordia signature at work: taking a familiar material and refusing the familiar outcome.
The evolution
The opening arrives like a hand in wet grass, immediate, vivid, borderline aggressive in its greenness. Tomato leaf absolute dominates for the first fifteen minutes, so realistic you can almost feel the fuzz on the stems. Then the citrus enters, not to replace the green but to illuminate it: lime and green mandarin cut sharp through the foliage, keeping the composition from going dense. The hand-off happens around minute twenty. Galbanum and tarragon step forward, bringing the aromatic complexity that shifts this from realistic to artistic, you're no longer standing in a garden, you're standing inside the idea of one. Blackcurrant adds a faint jammy sweetness underneath, barely perceptible but essential, keeping the whole thing from drying out. As the top notes recede, the composition transforms.
Cultural impact
Siordia is a Russian independent house that builds in literary and mythological reference rather than market positioning. The Green Sea of Cicadas speaks to buyers seeking green fragrances that refuse to be safe, those who want the tomato leaf and the wormwood, not just the bergamot and the musk. The composition appeals to wearers who want complexity without the aggressive sillage of heavier orientals, drawn instead to the verdant and the botanical.
